The Mercury Sable is a four-door sedan and station wagon marketed over five generations by Mercury for model years 1986-2005 as a mid-size car and 2008-2009 as a full size car, with a hiatus for model years 2006 and 2007, when a rebadged variant was marketed as the Mercury Montego. During its 21-year production run, the Sable was itself a badge-engineered variant of the contemporary Ford Taurus.

Along with the Taurus, the Sable was a milestone design, highly influential vehicle in the marketplace, with a total of 2,112,374 Sables marketed from 1985-2005.

Background

Ford had lagged in introducing mid-size front-wheel-drive cars to compete against General Motors' Chevrolet Citation and its best-selling Chevrolet Celebrity/Pontiac 6000/Oldsmobile Cutlass/Buick Century quartet as well as Chrysler's well-received K cars and Japanese offerings from Honda, Datsun/Nissan and Toyota. The Mercury brand suffered even more from this delay. In 1982, Ford launched the redesigned Mercury Cougar to start a reinvigoration of the Mercury brand with new aerodynamic designs, and started development of the Sable. Because of this design, the Sable was a resounding success and launched Mercury into a new design era, as well as influencing the other American automakers to follow suit and create more aerodynamic cars, thus ending the "boxy" cars of the 1970s and 1980s.

The Taurus and Sable siblings used flush aerodynamic composite headlights. Ford was the first to produce and sell vehicles with such headlights in the U.S., when it introduced the Lincoln Mark VII in 1983. To do so, Ford (among other automakers) had to lobby the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) to have them approved. The Taurus and Sable were the first domestically produced, mainstream sedans to use the new lights. They also went beyond the Audi 5000, with which they were often compared, to adopt a grille-less "bottom breather" nose, first pioneered by the Citroën DS in the 1950s, and also used briefly on the Mustang.

The Sable was unveiled along with the Taurus in a resounding fashion. For its aerodynamic shape, the launch was held in MGM Studios Soundstage 85, where Gone with the Wind was filmed. Ford workers came into the room, which was decorated in space-age decor, holding cups shaped like flying saucers and the Taurus and Sable were sitting behind a curtain, their outlines silhouetting. Then, with the flashing of strobe lights and a drum-roll, the curtain was pulled back and the two cars were revealed to the public. The Sable's design was considered so futuristic, that it was called by the press "The car that came from the moon". This introduction approach was used previously during the late 1950s by Ford to introduce a new car during a live broadcast called The Edsel Show.

The bodyshell was smooth and aerodynamic. The Sable twin had a wraparound "lightbar" with two headlights and a low-wattage stretch in between. Aircraft-style doors were used to reduce wind noise, and the handles were recessed. The Sable also had large glass areas with slim pillars, and were flush with the body. The rear glass wrapped fully around, and the B-pillars were painted black to give the illusion that the front and rear glass were connected. The interior was available with bucket seats — very rare for most U.S. midsize sedans — and the dashboard wrapped around the driver and fed into the door panels to create more of a "cockpit" feel.

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